


One Strange Day:

by TheLightdancer



Category: Power Girl (Comics), Superman (Comics), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Clark gets a cameo, High Cost of Living but on Krypton
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28178115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: Death of the Endless takes her one day to connect with mortals on every world, once a century. Knowing that this one is Krypton's last, she takes her day on Krypton in Earth-2, where a youthful Kara encounters a strange waif of a girl clad in black and the two have a very curious day.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Kudos: 1





	1. The writ of stars:

_Before the day, realm of Despair of the Endless:_

The clammy odor of her shadows stood out here, as did the various rats that ran around, some biting deep into her skin where the blood ran down and others like pets, giving her the kindness and affection that she deeply craved yet by her nature was not able to ask about or against. 

Beside her stood a sister with whom her relationship had been strained since her rebirth. Seldom did Death of the Endless go to speak to her sister, so to Despair these were moments to treasure. So long ago her sister had spent much time in her realm and they had been close. Then a blade had slain her and nearly slain Death and so much else had changed. Now they were here.

She looked at her sister's gaze, never judgmental (but she could see in the set of mirrors that had her that her hidden sorrows were stronger than usual), and kindly. She heard her sister's words, surprisingly professional and even cold for a being with so kind a gaze:

**_You are still sure about this?_ **

Despair nodded. 

**From this, I shall gain a champion of my other facet.**

She did not smile, it was not in her to smile, but there was a sense of strange irony that pervaded her words, giving them a bit of a rasp and an unusual confidence: 

**I've always thought this amusing. Stories are my brother's sphere and with this I shall write a decree that is twofold. Here, it is not the boy Clark who shall become the greatest of my people, but his cousin.**

She saw her in her mirror, for hope and despair are but two facets of the same emotion and the same function governed by the entity, a girl of mid-teenage years looking with a fondness at the newborn baby held in the exhausted arms of Lara Lor-Van, her aunt. 

Death inclined her head.

_**Why her?** _

Desire's words struck her to her very marrow and were followed by a look of wide eyes and an almost unseemly departure.

**Because like you she endures.**

In the wake of Death's departure Despair sat alone in her realm and sighed. She revealed too much, then, that she too knew all that Destiny knew and a little more, besides. She had seen it when her sister had taken her, and she had seen it when her sister knelt over her to give her the breath of life, dancing in her eyes. 

Despair watched, for in Kara Zor-L there was much to see, and it was a rare thing when Death's mortal days were solidly within her sphere rather than interweaving in all of them.

Despair watched, for she was despair and she was hope, and all who despaired and all who hoped were her.

\----------

_Argo City, Krypton, the next morning:_

Kara Zor-L awoke. She was fourteen cycles around Rao, a cycle slightly longer than Earth to a point that she was closer to sixteen in Earth terms, physically. She would only think that way much later when Krypton and Argo City were rubble and she'd come to her Earth to find her baby cousin grown into a man much the spitting image of uncle Jor-L but with a personality to match her own dad. Uncle Jor-L was a man of strong opinions. She yawned, scratching her back. She was fourteen years old, her body changing as she grew from girl to woman, and she looked at herself in the mirror. She was wearing her nightgown, of blue material with the red and yellow crest of the House of L on the chest area, the nightgown past her knees.

She yawned, stretched, and then got up. She wasn't a woman yet, and she was grateful for that. Adulthood had so many burdens.

She showered that morning as she usually did when she first woke up, finding the warmth of the water a relief, a quiet little thing (and the future her would mourn the loss of this, as with other sensations in the wake of the changes to come), and slipped from her nightgown into the trouser and blouse combination she had become used to wearing. Mother always called her her little tomboy with affection and she found the little part annoying but granted the other.

Her stomach rumbled and she decided to go down to the kitchen, overhearing a vehement conversation. Her father was unusually brooding and uncle Jor-L had his usual vehemence. She reflected if he had not become the greatest scientist of the age he might have become the Metropolitan of the Temple of Rao.

"I hear you, brother, and I take you seriously. But what can we do? If our planet is dying, if this Green Death is the cause, we're talking an entire planet. Billions of years of technology, the ability to do all of this. We can't evacuate it all, or most of it. We'd be required to reinvent things and I am not so sure we could find a world to do that."

Jor-L nodded, brushing his hand against his goatee.

"I know," he said, as Kara listened, quietly, against the wall. "I am still trying to work on that. Dru-Zod has given me suggestions that I think can work."

Her father snorted, a rude sound and she had to stifle a giggle. "Still working with Dru?"

Her uncle nodded. "I am. I know you do not like him, but he is worth respect. I hear that the Council considers him the next candidate for leader of the global Defense forces."

"If this Green Death wasn't threatening our world, he would."

Uncle Jor stiffened.

"You go too far, brother."

"Oh come on, Jor. You've seen him. You've seen the kind of man he is."

Kara slipped, slightly, cursing when she made a noise they could hear. Both of the men interrupted their conversation as Zor-L cleared his throat.

"Come out, Kara."

She crept out flushed, and their gaze was a perfect mirror of each other (Jor and Zor, after all, were nearly twins).

"What did you hear?"

"N-Nothing."

"Don't lie to me, dear heart. You heard something."

"I heard you talking about a Green Death and Colonel Zod."

Jor-L's gaze was hard. She expected her uncle to say something but it was her father who did instead.

"Kara, dear heart, I will insist on something that I seldom do, even if it makes me sound like......like Dru-Zod. Do not breathe a single word of what you've heard here to anyone. What your uncle and I were discussing was meant to be private. I am deeply disappointed in you for eavesdropping,'

She flushed with shame, and then ducked her head. 

Her uncle spoke, then. "Your father is as harsh as he is because what we are discussing is an issue that has no simple solution and much danger in mentioning it, let alone convincing the Council of its truth. He doesn't want you to risk your life."

Her eyes widened and she paled slightly. "It's that serious?"

Her father nodded. "Very much so."

She gulped. "Won't say anything to anyone, got it."

Her father and uncle looked to each other. "Your mother and your aunt know, so you can discuss it with them. I would have rather you not found out," her father sighed. "But at least this will ease the stress of having to keep this a secret."

She nodded again and accepted it, before wolfing down a hasty breakfast and rushing out.

Argo City, unlike Kryptonopolis, was near the Scarlet Jungles and the Fire Falls, and it was not a long run from her family's home to the woods.

She loved the Scarlet Jungles and the kind of life that lived here. There were creatures in the woods, great hairy things, the deep and distant cousins of Kryptonians. They were gigantic four-handed things, with deep brows and they were friendly vegetarians. She'd made friends with the whiteback that commanded the local troop, and knew all about them and how to tame them. She knew most of the things that were in those woods, which is why there were three things that happened that startled her beyond words.

The first was the discovery of a footprint in a muddier stretch of ground after the storms that had set in yesterday. It was a bare footprint and it was undeniably a Kryptonian, not the imprints of the Parakryptonians. It was one of several and she did not understand it at all, not what she saw, nor that she did see it.

The second was hearing singing in the woods, slow and lovely and beautiful, a voice that sounded like it wasn't truly Kryptonian at one level but a being pretending to be. She didn't recognize the words. It was not Kryptonese or Coluan or Oan or Warworldian, nor any of the tongues of the lesser species. She wasn't entirely sure if the sounds were words in any conventional sense and her breath caught. She'd found an alien, a real for true alien and a kind of first contact in the woods!

She hid behind a tree, as the singing came closer, and then she stared in surprise. There was a girl wearing a looser-fitting robe that cut off above the ankles, a sleeveless one that showed a body very pale. Almost unnaturally so. Her hair was dark, much darker than Uncle Jor-L and he and grandfather had some of the darkest hair of anyone on Krypton. Her eyes were strange, too. There was a gaze in them that belied the youthful age of the being she'd seen, a gaze like that she'd expect from the God Nightwing.

She had a sweet smile, almost too sweet.

"Hello," she chirped.

Kara froze.

"I can see you. Are you playing a game? If so I'm sorry I spoiled it."

She turned around and moved around from her tree.

"No, I'm not hiding from anyone. I'm in the woods for the morning. I......I like being in the woods. It's...soothing." 

The other woman smiled, softly.

"I know. Woods are like that. They let you think without thinking and just....be."

Karen nodded, glad someone just got it.

"What's your name?"

"Mors."

Kara found herself smiling in spite of herself.

"That's a funny name."

The other girl leaned in with her hands cupped and she leaned in too, to hear the secret.

"I'm not from here, that's why it sounds funny."

Kara grinned. "I knew you were an alien!"

Mors grinned, twirling slightly.

"So, what's the best thing to see around here?"

Kara gushed. "The Fire Falls, without a doubt!"

Mors cocked her head. "How close are we to the Fire Falls?"

"Very! Come on, I'll show you!"

With that she grabbed Mors' wrist and pulled her with her, the other girl laughing.

Neither of them saw the hulking being, a product of one of the many genetic modifications of Kryptonians, in his case to produce a lineage of scientists distinguished by being among the greatest of the world in physical strength and mental vision. So he had been, once. Then he had brought the warning of the Green Death to Colonel Dru-Zod, and to Jor-L, and then the Black Zero agency had scooped him up at midnight. Now he was changed, his mind altered, a collar around his neck. The collar was meant to infuse him with radiation, matching the wavelength of a yellow star, a punishment that was assumed would make him sickly and weak, given that those stars were more distant from their world.

But in truth it had not, it had made him strong, and a new figure of horror.

He had been Non, great scientist of Krypton, and now he was the Wild Man of the Woods.

He had been a great brain and an apex of Kryptonian physiology and science, once.

Now he was a horror that could shatter trees and hear footsteps, that blurred and rampaged and bellowed.

He had heard the footsteps of the one girl, and he had heard the singing of the other, and they led him to narrow his eyes. His new, changed mentality reacted differently than his other one would have, before that one would have heard the songs in the unknown language and wanted to speak to the other girl, to meet her, to find out what was there and what was not. He would have rejoiced to see Jor-L's niece and her ease in the wilderness. Now his enhanced hearing heard cracked branches and sounds that made his muscles tense, the air rasping with their movement.

He had become faster than a speeding bolt of plasma, more powerful than a mass transport shuttle, able to leap tall spires in a single bound.

He had heard intruders in _his_ grounds. He was given great power, and unknown to the Council, the effects of the radiation collar around his neck were not condemning him to die a slow and voiceless death by cancer, but repairing the damage done to his brain, albeit in a manner that tilted to make him as smart as he had been....and with a mentality rooted to a more murderous one.

He began to follow quietly, moving in the air, so that there was no sound of footfall, knowing that Kara Zor-L would not look up. She was never a cautious person.

If he had seen Dru-Zod riding his own speeder on his way to meet with Jor-L to ask him if he'd seen or heard anything about his mentor, he would probably have tried to attack him.

He did not realize that Zod's speeder pinged, and that Zod looked down and almost fell off his speeder to what would have been a sure and messy death. In the woods there were two girls running to the river of flames that flowed from the Fire-Falls....and a hulking figure nude as the day he was born that growled and snarled and _and walked on thin air and did not fall._

"He's not falling," breathed Dru-Zod. "W....Why isn't he _falling_?" 

He tapped his wrist-comm and nano-tech armor flowed around him, armor that enhanced his strength and permitted him to wield great feats if wielded in combat. He had a feeling he was going to be giving it a very great test indeed. He swooped down to a clearing not so far from the Falls.

\-----

Kara heard the rumbling sound of a speeder and froze for a moment, eyebrow raised, then snorting and shrugging.

"Dru-Zod," she grumbled.

"Who?" Her companion, almost as out of breath as she was, as the heat of the Falls was now a palpable thing against them both, asked with genuine curiosity.

"Colonel Dru-Zod, one of the genetically enhanced super-generals commissioned by the Planetary Council. The first potential Warmaster of Krypton since the Eradicator and the Black Zero War."

She couldn't resist a bitter laugh.

"Not my favorite person but there are no people more loyal to Krypton than he is."

She froze for a moment, her peripheral vision catching something, something improbable, something that had seemed to freeze and then blur into shadows. A man, walking on the air. She blinked, rubbing her eyes.

Impossible. Nothing on Krypton could fly, flight was for fever-dreams and old stories of what happened when Kryptonians encountered worlds with golden and blue stars and the ensuing God-Wars led the planet to adapt its AI-centric space program instead of flesh and blood.

She saw what looked like a trace of a shoulder and a hand moving for a second, wiped her eyes again and even slapped herself. The dull ache in her cheek led her to curse, slightly.

"No, I'm not dreaming."

Mors looked at her curiously.

"What's going on?"

"I think we're about to get real exercise."

"What do you mean?"

The thing that had hid knew they'd seen it now and she saw it quite literally striding out of the shadows, standing in mid-air.

She shoved Mors forward, the other woman making a surprised squawking sound she disregarded.

"I mean RUN!"

With that the two women began to run, as a thing that hovered near the branches snarled in a booming sound that smote the air, and then it began to _blur._

Kara Zor-L would find many cruel ironies in life, and among them was that this would end up being her first encounter with what her own future would be, not in a dream, but in a terrible waking nightmare where the woods snarled with the voice of a god and something moved impossibly fast and strong toward them with a hypersonic shock blowing leaves off of the trees. 

In a shower of crimson leaves two women ran, caught between the hellish Fire Falls and a thing that was moving toward them with impossible speed and strength....


	2. Kneel before Non:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A shadow of the future to come faces Kara Zor-L and Mors in the Crimson Forest.

_Near the Edge of the Fire Falls:_

The snarling _thing_ landed before them with its mouth twisted into an ugly sneer. It was a thing that had once been the scientist Non and after his lobotomy by the Kryptonian High Council had been renamed Nam-Ek, the better to conceal his crimes. His eyes blazed with a terrible light. His brain was recovering, under the influence of the strange radiation wavelengths but it had not recovered quite _right._ He would have recognized in another context the youthful Kara, daughter of his protege's brother, and he would have spoken to her in a friendly tone even in his pain, even in the wake of that _transformation._ Now all he saw was a means to hurt the House of L by proxy. 

He moved toward the two women with a blurring sound and yet the other one, the strange one, stood in front of the daughter of the House of L with a determined look on her face.

The transformed Non grinned with his grin more that of a twisted animal than a Kryptonian.

"Get of my way,girl," he growled.

The girl, whose name he did not know, looked him levelly in the eye and spoke to him in perfect Kryptonese of his local dialect:

"No. Non, you can be better than this."

Kara froze for a moment. _This_ was Non? She was told that he was dead! 

The creature grinned then and then reached out with his hand and she winced as Mors' arm _snapped_ in the grip and was nearly torn out of its socket, her back crunching as she landed with a pained scream, somehow miraculously still alive.

Non's eyes blazed with a terrible light.

"Daughter of the House of L...." he purred, his voice more the growl of the sub-Kryptonian primitive ancestors of their species than one of the planet's most refined scientists.

"Burn."

As he prepared to fire the beams from his eyes she heard the sounds of Krypton's military machines in motion and Non snarled and then he _moved._

Dru-Zod's own first encounter with what yellow-star radiation could do to his species was a sudden _blurring_ motion and the bloody sight of one of his ships torn to shreds, severed bodyparts flying and then two beams of reddish-golden light literally ripping through the metal. A blood-stained revenant that stretched at the edges of what Kryptonian power could hope to achieve howled with such power that it shook sensors. It paused for a moment when it saw the symbols of the House of Zod, and then Zod snarled: 

"Open fire with the temporal dampeners" and the finest technology of Krypton began a battle that moved faster than even its sensors could give a full picture. The temporal dampeners did slow the creature that was coated in gore, and the sight of Non's gaze looking at him with a sense of incomprehension and bemusement was horrifying enough that he followed it with orders for the more fearsome and esoteric weapons. The fearsome thing that had been Non took an amazing amount of punishment to strike down, but eventually it did fall and it fell in a bloody mess and the impact left a crater where it fell.

It was placed in a set of chains that glowed with a lesser version of the power of the Green Death, as a triply certain precaution. Zod stared in horror at the monster, and at the meaning of its transformation.

The incision in the brain was there, but the damage had been _repaired,_ if not entirely correctly.

He then turned to see a terrified and shivering Kara Zor-L, She had run to a girl he had never seen before. She had evidently tried to face the monster and he saw bones protruding from her skin and her back twisted at an impossible angle. He felt sorrow, at first, for the loss of a being so selfless as this and then when he lowered his helm and scanned her more closely he saw two anomalies. One. this being did not truly register in any set of sensors he used. Two.....she _lived._ She breathed. Wounds that should have killed her twenty times over had not.

Zod felt amazed and repelled by this, but in the end he had much weightier things to concern himself with than a single alien with unnatural endurance. One of Krypton's supposedly dead scientists had turned up as a raving howling monster that had slain an entire platoon of some of his finest soldiers in under a minute. He had a scar on his head reflecting an attempt to reduce him to a beast and in a very limited amount of time that scar and that damage had been undone. 

He turned to two of his soldiers, "Faora, Ursa, take the alien and the daughter of Zor-L to a healing chamber. Kara Zor-L should be fine, make sure the alien recovers."

"Should we investigate her, sir?"

"Right now we have bigger problems. This? I think it means I need to have a very different kind of talk with Jor-L and to start taking a second look at that data of his."

With that the two soldiers, one with reddish hair, one with black, strode and they carefully picked up an alien they were sure was dead. When they felt her breathing they were awed and more than slightly horrified.

\--------

Kara spent a half-hour in the healing chamber. She was a daughter of Krypton in the time that none save Jor-L, Zor-L, and eventually Dru-Zod and his Black Zero Army came to realize were its last days. She took for granted its technological sophistication, which was at a level that even the near-legendary creatures of the Fourth World, the proud sons of Highfather and the monstrous children of Darkseid, did not go near it. She took it for granted, but it still awed her that the sheer scale of the damage done to Mors was repaired so totally, to a point that when Mors strode out of the chamber and looked at herself and her nudity (even if, by some strange oddity that was among the other oddities of this day, her ankh had not been able to be removed so easily as all that), she looked at herself impressed and then turned to flash Kara a brilliant grin.

"Now that was peachy-keen," she grinned.

Kara cocked her head.

"What in the name of Nightwing and Flamebird is wrong with you? You literally were almost killed a half-hour ago and now you're acting like you enjoyed it?"

Mors shrugged. "Life has its ups and downs. Some more up or down than others, but still."

Kara blinked. "You are the weirdest person I've ever met."

Mors gave her a cryptic smile that for a moment seemed far too knowing and too ancient an expression for someone Kara's own age and that creeped her out too.

"Well, as nice as the trip to the forest and the exercise was, I hear your hometown is a wonderful place. Want to show me around?"

Her voice was compelling and Kara could not resist that compulsion, much as a part of her tried to.

Another anomaly in a time and a moment full of them.

She nodded then, dully, and went with Mors.

First, though, she faced her father and mother, who were right outside the healing chamber.

\-------

She braced herself for the angry words and the lecturing that bordered on yelling from her parents and was speechless when she was hugged, and when she felt tears from their eyes.

She stood back a bit.

"Mom? Dad?"

"You are very lucky," her father's voice spoke with a near hissing sound and she saw something in the face of Zor-L that she had never imagined seeing and would only see one other time, when destiny's cruel whims struck Krypton and left her then one of the last of her kind.

"You could have died there. General Zod told me enough of what happened. You will tell no-one except myself, your mother, and your aunt and uncle about what you saw there. Understood?"

His words were harsh and angry, a cold tone in them that Kara did not understand. She was more than slightly terrified as where she'd expected anger, it was not this kind of anger.

"I understand, dad," she said, her voice with a light tilt of strain in her words.

With that, she slipped out but not before hearing part of a conversation between her parents and Mors.

Mors' playful and yet vaguely said "I'll be seeing you" when she left left her confused.

\-------

As they slipped out into the streets of Argo City, from its healing chambers, Kara took in a deep breath. In the years to come and the longer and more painful isolations that would stack on each other, this day would preserve for her the memories of the sights of her hometown, a memory never to be effaced or altered by time, or what was worse than time. That would be the memories she chose to conserve of that day, and of its course.

But when they did leave, as her parents would leave a bit later, she pulled Mors into an alley between the healing chambers and one of the other spires of Argo City, where the Singing Crystals tended to echo with the preserved art and music of both Argo City and a surprisingly large archive of all of Krypton's knowledge of same. Her confusion and the built-up adrenaline from the horrific roaring thing that had attacked them and then fallen from the sky covered and blood and taken down by General Zod, meant that she slammed Mors against the building.

Her expression betrayed anger and bemusement, her lips tight, eyes narrowed.

"What in the name of Rao are you? You should have died there in that forest!"

Mors looked at her and then with a smile as if she was sharing a joke, leaned forward.

Karen leaned forward too.

"I'm Death," she said. Her smile became that warm and kindly one again.

"What." Karen's eyes narrowed and she said that word again with the same flat element. "What."

She shook her head. "You're not Death, you can't be Death. Death, insofar as she exists, is a being clad in black but her skin is the color of bone."

She lifted Mors' right hand, and held it against hers.

"You have the same skin tone I do."

Mors smiled for a moment at their skin against each other and there was something in that other grin that bemused Kara at a further level.

She looked more closely and understood, dropping Mors' hand.

"You're lonely, aren't you?"

For a moment the mask cracked and the grinning and sweet girl showed that ancient face, one lined with a grief and sorrow that Kara could understand all too well. She was one of the smartest people in her world, potentially smarter than even Uncle Jor. Her thoughts moved at speeds others did not, and she could make intellectual leaps in manners that both amazed and confused others.

She understood, and that understanding reached Mors who looked at her with wonder in a manner that left her a bit uneasy but she understood that kind of wonder too.

A moment passed in the alley where both looked anywhere but at each other, their expressions and motions awkward.

"So...." said Kara, who finally broke that silence.

"Shall we?"

Mors smiled a smile that was sadder than the others and she began to walk by Kara as she turned to the building they were right next to.

"Let's go here first. The Hall of the Singing Crystals, where Krypton has saved so much of its art and its music."

She opened the door and went in, and Mors followed her.


End file.
